Old School Attitude… Modern Rules

Arduin Grimoire, Part IV

Out Of Alignment

BTW, in case anyone stumbles on one of these pages out of order, and wonders how to get the hell away find the rest, I’m trying to gather them all here. Enjoy. Or not. It’s up to you, really. Who am I to tell you what to do?

So, in this post, we look at “Notes on Fantastic Beings”, and alignment. Sorry, allignment. For charcters. Sorry, characters.

Fantastical Beasts And How To Kill Them

Or, more accurately, “Notes On Fantastic Beings”.

Those of you more used to modern games, with their 256 page hardbound books detailing every aspect of a race’s culture, heritage, history, and preferred sexual positions might be a little aghast, possibly even awight or aspectre, at how little information was generally provided back in Ye Olden Dayse, and Dave Hargrave’s writing style was nothing if not terse. He had, after all, an imagination that spanned multiple infinities, and a hundred half-size pages to try to cram it into. So, we get to these two pages of “Notes”, where all the infinite complexity and depth of distinct and unique species were reduced to a line of text.

And we loved it. Well, I loved it, at any rate. I want just enough to get my mind going, just enough to provide the most basic platform for a shared conversation. When I buy a game, I want my crunch detailed out to the difference in damage potential between Pewter Mug, Hurled and Silver Tankard, Hurled, and my fluff to be basically someone leaving a sticky note on the page reading “put fluff here”. (Not applicable to games set in commercial universes, where I mostly buy them for the fluff.)

Thus, we learn that Hobbitts(sic) are “Happy, hungry” and “Always eating, brave but usually inept.” We learn that kobolds gang up on both thieves and cripples, and, by inference, the value of a semicolon vs. a comma. (We also see the root of many battles between players and DMs on the literal vs. intended meaning of the rules, with the battle lines being clearly drawn: If the literal reading favors you, argue it; if the intended reading favors you, argue it; and if neither the literal nor the intended reading favors you, buy the DM Chinese food.)

Orcs are immortal. Who knew? (Dave Hargrave, that’s who!)

So, from this we learn orcs are immortal, elves are in self-denial, amazons are pushy lesbians, and (on a page I didn’t scan) that harpies, furies, and gargoyles are “erratic, fanatical, and sadistic”. We also learn that genetics in Arduin were pretty darn fluid, and that human-giant matings were possible, though, thankfully, the exact details of the process were left out.

I seem to recall a “kobbit” is a kobold/hobbitt(sic…k of typing ‘sic’, just deal with Mr. Hargrave’s “Please Don’t Sue Me” spelling) crossbreed, which is kind of gross, but “kobolds” back then were generally closer to their mythic origin as fey “little people” and less “tiny little dragon folk with serious delusions of grandeur”.

It is interesting how most of the non-human races had long, even unending, lifespans — a definite flip on the D&Dism that all the ‘evil’ races died young (to explain their ability to breed in massive numbers so that dungeons were perennially replenished with mooks).

Come Up With Another Clever Pun On ‘Alignment’ Before Posting This

Seriously, This Better Not Show Up In The Final Article

Alignment wars began pretty much with the publication of OD&D, and I don’t mean “The cosmic battle of law vs. chaos” alignment wars, I mean “The comical battle of rules lawyers vs. each other” alignment wars. The exact boundaries of law, chaos, good, evil, what they meant, what they controlled, if paladins who slaughtered pregnant orcs also got XP for the fetuses, etc. Thomas Aquinas himself would be puzzled by that last one. (No, that’s not from one of my personal experiences, sadly/gladly. That was mentioned in a recent Knights Of The Dinner Table strip, and the fact it rang true tells you a lot. If you truly want to understand a culture, read its insider humor, says Lizard.)

Such debates have run to terabytes of terrifying text (I do get paid by the Alliteration Alliance Of America, why do you ask?), and I, in the words of Whitman, “have contributed a verse”, if “Look, lint-for-brains, even given your established stupidity and bull-headedness, your latest piece of word-salad drivel reaches new heights of incredibly inchoate incomprehensibility” is “a verse”.

Mr. Hargrave, however, strips all of that down to a simple, single, page that clearly answers all possible questions.

Did I Say “Character Alignment”? I Meant “Charcter Allignment”

Or, perhaps, not. But as with most of his work, it aims to inspire more than to inform, and that’s not wrong.

It is perhaps worth noting the chart discusses the “Charcter” and “Allignment” of players, and if one interprets “Character” to mean “Morality and Ethics”, then, the chart is actually for the people sitting around the table, which might say a lot about who Dave gamed with.

Note: I will occasionally (often) make fun of the various typos and idiosyncratic spellings in these books, because that’s what I do… mock people who are a thousand times more creative than I could ever be… but it’s also important to remember they were written in an era when self-publishing was barely a step above chiseling words into stone. You couldn’t just edit your files on a word processor and make changes when you spotted them; redoing layouts was slow and very expensive. Besides, constantly reading, editing, and rewriting runs counter to the raw exuberance of unfettered creation; the more you question the technical details of your work, the more likely you are to begin questioning your ideas, and if you do that, you don’t have kobbit barbarians venturing side-by-side with phraint thieves and half-elf star-powered mages. (I think half-elves could be SPMs… we’ll know when we get to Book 3, The Runes Of Doom.)

And I think I’ll declare that any similar errors found in these pages is my attempt to capture the true spirit of the age, and not merely laziness or incompetence on my part. Yeah. That’s the ticket.

But enough about me. (Ow… even typing those words hurt my soul.) Let’s look at the chart. First, you’ll notice a lot more alignments. (No, I’m not going to keep typing ‘allignment(sic)’. Even I know when to stop running a joke into the ground. I usually don’t stop, but I know when to. And knowing is half the battle.) The Arduin Grimoire was published in 1977, before most of AD&D came out, and the D&D world was still transitioning. Alignments had gone from three, to five, to nine, in just few years… and many early players, seeing the flaws of the original L,C,N system, were creating their own before Gygax could jump in. We see, thus, shadows of homebrew rules mixed in with the changes to the “core” rules.

Factor Tutorials

It’s, Erm, Sort Of A Lame Pun On ‘Factorials’, Which Doesn’t Really Make Sense

Give Me A Break, I Have A Fifty Hour Work Week+2 Hour Commute And I Don’t Get Paid To Write This, You Know.

My Paypal Is lizard@mrlizard.com. Just Sayin’.

So, we have Kill Factor, Lie Factor, Tolerance Factor, etc. These are used to… erm… uhm… well, basically, there’s no real rules for them. Everyone buying the Arduin Grimoire, unless they happened to know Dave personally, could interpret these numbers however they chose. It’s interesting that even in those earliest days of gaming, there was a nascent push towards personality mechanics, something to reinforce, with dice, what it said on the tin, if your character sheet was printed on tin.

“Lie Factor” is kind of interesting. I mentioned typos earlier. Well, one such typo in original D&D was an entry for “%Liar” on every monster. It was supposed to be “%Lair” — the odds that a monster, when randomly encountered, would be in its lair, where it had a lot more treasure. However, early players, taking the rules as written, often interpreted it literally. Dave Hargrave included “%Liar” in the monster section of the Grimoire, which we’ll get too eventually. The context around these entries made it very clear he did, indeed, mean “Liar” and not “Lair”. Murphy’s Rules later dinged him on this, noting he had simply imitated D&D, and he responded with, sadly, an all too typical reaction, insisting he’d always meant for Greedo to shoot first…. erm, that Arduin was a free-standing game and not an ‘imitation of D&D’. Yeah, right. It is, in fact, possible for me to consider Mr. Hargrave a Greater God (400 HP and all!) in my personal pantheon of creative influences, and still roll my eyes and sigh at the kind of self-delusion that would cause him to make such a claim. Everything about the original Arduin Trilogy speaks to its role as a supplement to D&D.

Surely, This Was The First And Last Time A Cartoon Caused Someone To React With Undue Outrage

Arduin Grimoire, Part III

A Man (Hobgoblin, Nixie, Cave Man) Has Got To Know His Limitations

Now, we turn to character racial class, level, and attribute limits. You damn punk kids might not know this, but time was, there were no half-orc paladins, dwarf archmages, or gnome druids. (Leeky Windstaff is annoyed!) Well, unless you played pretty much any game other than D&D, because racial class/level limits were one of the first “D&Disms” to be flung out as the RPG industry moved past the Cambrian era and into the… damn it, I used to know what came next. Devonian? Anyway, time was (and by “time was”, I mean, it took TSR going belly-up and WOTC taking over in 2000 to finally shed this bit of nonsensical anti-design), races were “balanced” by front-loading them with all sorts of k3wl p0w3rz (such as the power to invoke arguments over if you could read with infravision or not)1, and then, in the off-chance the game lasted long enough, screwing them over by paralyzing them at relatively low levels, so that only humans could advance high enough to kill Thor. (That was, erm, the ultimate goal of D&D, right? To use Deities And Demigods as a monster manual?)

Anyhoo, Arduin of course needed to have such a table, which served to partially replace the old D&D table, due to the many new races supported, not mention the new classes, which… uhm… well, you see, there’s only so much space on the page, and so… erm…

Well, first, of the countless new classes Arduin introduced (to be dealt with soon), only the Psychic is on this chart. As for the rest, erm, “All Others”… Trolls, you see, are just as good as being Slavers as they are Saints.

Seriously. They just ran out of room on the page and said “Fuck it!”.

That’s how we all rolled back then, and it was glorious.

(Oh, the big white blob is me deliberately whiting out part of the scan, because it turns out this walkthrough requires a lot more illustration than mine usually do, or maybe I just want to share the immense joy2 reading each part of this book still brings to me in a more visceral way, but I also want to stay within the bounds of fair use.

Anyway, I’ve been talking a bit about wonders, strange visions, exotic realms, and that hasn’t been too evident yet. Here’s where it starts. What’s a gnorc? A kobbit? You can play a Fury? A spider can be a fifth level mage? WTF? Felines? Canines?

OK. First, a “*” means “Cannot take this class.” So, there are no Spider Clerics. “**” means “Unlimited”, so a Kobbit can be a 105th level thief. And a number means… y’know, if I have to explain that, how the hell did you end up reading this article? G’wan, shoo!

On the spider thing (From What If #451, “What If Ben Grimm Was Bitten By A Spider That Was Radioactive Due To Cosmic Rays?”)…it was noted:”Normal insects and animals are not smart enough to do much of anything, but there are were-creatures and other types that will fit the bill”, so, there you are.

Only at page 5, and we’re talking about the possibility of 12th level Mermaid Psychics. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, EGG was starting on his first draft of a rant about how ridiculous pixie-storm giant hybrids were. (But drow cavaliers dual-wielding lances? EGG was totally cool with that.) Battle lines were being drawn, lines which extend to this day, between the dour advocates of low-power, low-magic, low-fun, play, and the liberated, free, and joyous advocates of cyborg ninjas battling dragon/beholder crossbreeds through the corridors of the Death Star. If you can’t tell where my bias lies, check my choice of adjectives. It’s a dead giveaway.

(Acting on the odd assumption anyone reading one of my rants is masochistic enough to read a second, or even a third (if you’re that into pain, I have a good friend who can help you find a skilled professional in that area… not kidding…), they might note there’s some dead horses I beat, again and again, as if they were trolls and I can’t stop them regenerating. There’s two reasons: First, I write this stuff extemporaneously, so, if something inspires me to write a rant once, a similar stimulation will inspire a similar rant. Two, there’s no way to know who is reading this (if anyone is) or in what order, so there’s no reason to assume that any point I made 50-odd posts ago has been already seen, or ever will be seen, so it’s often essential to reiterate the same themes. So it goes.)

Though, to be fair, “race” here (mostly) means “a genuinely different species”, as opposed to “a bunch of made up, arbitrary, and totally random divisions” as it is when it comes to humans. (Though, not sure if “Amazons” are a different species, rather than simply a different culture… )

A few things to note:

Humans aren’t “the best of everything”, without limits, as they are in D&D. Elves can be smarter, Hobbitts (sic) more dextrous, and so on.

Swimming ability? Stamina? Magic Resistance? These aren’t in the D&D of the era, and they aren’t explained in the Grimoire. As we saw with Booty And The Beasts, an awful lot of house rules were so commonly used among certain gaming communities that when people put out books for general publication, they tended not to realize such rules were not universal. “Fish have no word for water”, and all that.

The chart goes on beyond zebra, to “Lesser Giants”, “Balrogs and Lesser Demons”, and so on.

Gnomes are “10% less in all respects”, than, presumably, dwarves, but I’m not sure what 10% of 5-12 is. 5-0.5 -> 12-1.2, or 4.5 to 10.8? 5 to 11? Again, we see the problem of “too much imagination, too few pages”.

Here’s part of page two of the chart, just to show the range of Mr. Hargrave’s vision of D&D…

Energy beings, silicate life (hortas), undead… this section, in the rules, is entitled “Character Limitation Chart”, but it, like most of the trilogy, is about transcending limits, about including anything you can imagine, no matter how outre or inconsistent.

Back when I paid attention to RPG.net, there would be continual queries from people trying to play “old school” styles games, regarding if they should include this or that, add thus-and-such a rule, or invoke some particular mechanic, if adding in these things would dilute the purity of the old school experience and corrupt its precious bodily fluids. That they felt they needed to ask such questions told me, instantly, that the idea of what “old school” gaming was all about was being communicated to them wretchedly, to the point of actually teaching the opposite lesson.

Lizard’s Old School Rule Number One: If you think there’s rules about rules, you’re doing it wrong. (Ironic self-contradiction intended.)

The canonical 1970s-era DM had a dozen three-ring binders full of his house rules. Everyone was a game designer, and no one had any idea of “simplicity” as a design aesthetic in and of itself. Older games had far fewer (not necessarily “simpler”, mind you) rules than newer ones, but that had more to do with the cost of paper and the rush to publish in an exploding market than it did any conscious, deliberate, design choice. Hell, the idea of a “design philosophy” for RPGs was still decades away. The genre was too new, too vibrant, too full of potential to be tied down with boundaries and limits. It was the Wyld, all boundless creativity and change, as yet untamed by the Weaver, and far from being corrupted by the Wyrm, otherwise known as Lorraine Williams, and by using 1990s White Wolf terms to describe 1970s D&D gaming, I just made RPGPundit’s head explode.

I’ll just leave y’all now with a picture of a vampusa. (Vampire Medusa, duh. )

That’s a lance it’s holding, by the way.

1:”Dude, in this issue of Daredevil, he could totally read with his fingers because the letters were cooler than the paper, so I can read with infravision!”

Arduin Grimoire, Part II

In Which We Actually Open The Book

Just reading the PC’s names makes you want to play!

Sorry about the blurry edges; if you think I’m going to press my 37-year-old copy flat just to get a clean scan for the benefit of the three or four people who might read this, you’re nuts. Anyhoo, just look at the PC names of his campaign, and imagine all the cool shit they did, and remember this book was published in 1977, when D&D had only been out for about three years! That’s a LOT of amazing gaming crammed into a very short period of time! I am deeply, profoundly, bitterly envious of the people who got to sit at Dave’s table.

We start with “How To Play The Game”, which notes people are unsure about the “sequence of play” in a fantasy game, so “here is a rundown of most play situations”.

The next line? “Overland Travel”.

Dave goes on to explain that you travel an hour, roll for random encounters, Then follows a bunch of stuff about line of sight, distance to the encounter, chances of an encounter, if the encounter is close, what kind of close encounter it is (OK, I made up those last two), if the monster is frightened or not, if it’s charging, how to determine initiative, and so on. This includes numerous die tables, of the “1-2 this, 3-4 that” type. Oh, wait, did I say “tables”? Bwahahaha! No, the entire “sequence of play”, including odds of random encounters (with modifiers for terrain type and time of day), and all the other folderol I mentioned, are all in one immense paragraph.

I’m guessing the “uncertainty” over the “sequence of play” came from wargamers used to “Player 1 Movement Phase, Player 2 Prep Musket Phase, Player 1 Rally Phase, Player 2 Sneers At Player 1’s Incorrect Color Scheme For The Seventh Lancers Phase, Player 1 Shoves Incorrectly Painted Seventh Lancer Up Player 2’s Nose Phase”, and so on. It’s a sign of the times, of the gaming world in transition, from groups of fat neckbearded nerds arguing endlessly over the effects of wind on massed fire to groups of fat neckbearded nerds arguing endlessly over the effects of wind on massed fireballs. Those kinds of radical cultural changes can be shocking to the people living through them.

Following the rules for rolling random encounters come the rules for experience points, because, why not? In Arduin, you don’t get XP for gold. “It is the act of robbery, not the amount stolen, that gives the thief his experience.” says Dave, and I concur.

This table is, at least, a table. You get 400 XP for dying (and being resurrected), 375 for being the sole survivor of an expedition (oh, that couldn’t possibly go wrong!) or for retrieving the most powerful of artifacts, all the way down to 50 XP for figuring out traps and casting “lesser” spells such as “locks and winds”.

To put these numbers in perspective, here’s the XP chart… (Please note the ‘Saint’ class isn’t actually in this book. Or the Courtesan.

The “Slaver” class isn’t in here, either.

Yes, levels went up to 105. I assume you figured out the “missing” levels by extrapolating from the points given.

I’m just gonna let that “levels go up to 105″ thing sink in. First, remember this was published only three years after D&D came out. Second, next time some wannabe “old school Renaissance” type who wasn’t even born when AD&D Second Edition was published tries to tell you that in the Old Days (which he wasn’t around for, but which he heard about from this guy who knows this guy…) it was all fantasy fucking Vietnam and scrabbling for copper pieces and PCs were weak and no one had cool powers and everything now is all WoWMMORPGVideoGameSuperMarioCrap, you just point him this way. I’ll straighten him out. (Or her. One mustn’t be sexist. There’s just as many women repeating tired platitudes they’ve picked up from online forums as there are men. )

Following is another page of XP charts, and then, the Character Limitation Chart. And, hey, y’know what? Posting small articles frequently is probably better than long articles never, so, smeg it, this goes up now.

Walking Through The Arduin Triology (And Maybe The Others)

Or, Why Didn’t I Think Of This Before?

Because I’m Extremely Dim, That’s Why!

So, I’ve raved on and on about the Arduin books, how much they meant to me in my formative years (just as your first porn exposure will probably influence your YouPorn searches for the rest of your life, Or So I’ve Heard), and while I’ve done extensive writing on the heavily Arduin-influenced Booty And The Beasts and the Necromican, I haven’t actually taken the path more traveled and looked at the actual books!

So, here you go.

As with most of my stuff, this is a mix of humor, personal commentary, analysis, and random ephemera, mixed with extemporanea and just a hint of nutmeg. Those looking to discern a hidden agenda in it (see the IMPORTANT WARNING in the Necromican article linked to above) are morons. Those looking to discern a distinctive and coherent point of view in it are holding me in far too much esteem. To quote myself:

(Some people might note I make snide comments about how supplements like Booty And The Beasts veered heavily into a “screw the players”, highly adversarial mode of play, and then note I make snide comments about how 4e goes out of its way to avoid those types of mechanics, and wonder what side I’m on. It’s easy. I’m on the side of “Lizard wants to make snide comments.”.)

So, bear that in mind.

I’ve started three paragraphs with “so”. Weird.

Anyway…

Arduin Grimoire

I first encountered hints of these works in the “Best Of The Dragon” that came out around 1979, in an advertisement. In those days, there was no Internet, and gaming news had to spread slowly, through messages pounded into the pulp of dead trees, and sometimes, we had to just carve them in the bark, instead. The ad showed lizard-people and insect people and others, all far more exotic and interesting that the relatively tame Tolkien-inspired characters of D&D, and the ad copy hinted at untold wonders and strangeness beyond words.

But I didn’t actually find the books until a year or so later, at the Compleat (sic) Strategist in New Jersey, back when there was one in New Jersey. And, yes, unlike most things in life, from the covers of lurid paperbacks to the description of the job you’re applying for, the actual thing did not disappoint. The three little books were so densely packed with ideas, reality warped around them. If I have to pick “The books that influenced my life”, it would be these. Well, and Lee/Kirby FF. Oh, and the LSH where they fight Computo. But mostly, Arduin.

And so, we journey now into strange new worlds.. but first…

A Tale Of Two Covers

I had managed to borrow a copy of the Arduin Grimoire for a day or two, several months before I got my hands on it. For a long time after that, I thought I might be suffering from mixed, false, memories, as there were things I recalled from my first reading that I never saw again. However, the truth has since come to light: There was a first printing, with a different cover and interior art. The first printing had art by “a talented young man named Erol Otus”. You, ahem, may have heard of him. The subsequent editions… did not, and his name was excised from the forward, as if sliced out with a mu-meson sword (yes, that’s in there somewhere, Book 3, I think… we’ll get to it.) I am sure there is a story there, but as Dave Hargrave is long dead, we probably won’t get to hear it, and besides, I don’t really want to know the grungy details of mid-70s internecine geek warfare.

Two Covers, No Waiting

Now, without any disrespect for Mr. Otus, whom I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time praising, I still sort of prefer the one on the right. The exotic weapons and armor, the fine detail, the diversity of the PCs, the glowering demon over the door… words like “evocative” and “inspiring” come to mind. I want to create worlds, and write books, that give others the same feeling that picture gives me.OK, enough of the early stuff. Let’s turn the page…Later. Time to take my wife to the fabric store. But I wanted to post up something, since it’s been almost six weeks, which is long, even for me.

Nature, Like A Cat, Abhors A Vacuum

Which Kind Of Sucks (Pun Intended) Given What I’ve Just Realized

So, I’m in the library, doing some light reading of the 1E Manual Of The Planes, when a thought occurs to me.

All of the elemental planes are composed almost entirely of a single element, spotted, here and there, with islands of other elements, so that there are motes of Earth and Air in the infinite ocean of the Plane of Water, and so on.

While these motes may seem large, locally, they are nothing compared to the infinity of ‘pure’ substance that fills the plane. After all, as Douglas Adams noted, anything over infinity is so close to zero as makes no odds, which is why there is no intelligent life in the universe.

Now, all along, we’ve been told, from our earliest days, that we live in the Prime Material Plane, the very center of the multiverse, the heart of reality. This lie — and it is a lie! — has been part of every system of religion and philosophy ever recorded, except perhaps in obscure third party sourcebooks. But even a moment’s thought — once one is freed from the shackles of propaganda and conditioning — reveals the truth. What is the dominant substance in our universe?

Vacuum is overwhelmingly more common than anything else, even hydrogen.

As we all know, the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Vacuum lies where the Plane Of Air intersects the Negative Material Plane…. very far from the “center of the multiverse”. It is universally derided as one of the most boring and useless of all planes, whose inhabitants have barely been cataloged, as they rarely interact with anything interesting.

That’s us. That’s where we live — pathetic organic motes clinging to the tiny blobs of not-vacuum that are effectively non-existent when ratioed against the infinite nothingness that truly comprises our plane.

I have completed the great work Galileo began. First, Earth was not the center of the universe; then, we learned our star was one of billions in our galaxy; then, we learned our galaxy was one of trillions in the universe; and now, I have revealed our ‘universe’ is merely extraplanar pollution in the purity of the Quasi Elemental Plane Of Vacuum! The deception that we lived in the Prime Material has been revealed, the curtain has been pulled back, and behind it is… nothing. Infinite nothing! Our home, the plane of emptiness, the final borderland beyond which lies only anti-life itself, the Negative Material!

Figurine Of Wondrous Power: Scorpion Throne

Owen Stephens posted this image on FB. With the Halloween theme for RPGBloggers being Things That Go Bump In The Night,[1] I decided this fit, reasonably well, and as you may have noted from my update schedule, getting any content on here lately is a triumph, so you’ll bloody well like it!

The image source, BTW, is this Russian site. I didn’t know there were Russian sites that weren’t serving porn and malware. Huh.

Anyway…

Scorpion Throne Figurine Of Wondrous Power

Aura: Strong Transformation CL14 Price 78,400 gp

DESCRIPTION

This figurine is actually constructed as a clever mechanical puzzle, about four inches in size. Interlocking and pivoting parts allow it to be transformed between the scorpion shape and the form shown in the picture above. (Rumors of similar figurines, which include a freight carriage, a crossbow, and a glider, cannot be confirmed.) When the command word is spoken, it becomes one of two creatures, depending on the form it was in. If it was only partially changed, the command word fails. (Reconfiguring the figurine is a standard action that provokes an AOO. Excessive force is not required!)

Form 1: Battle Scorpion

The figurine becomes a Giant Emperor Scorpion, which will obey the orders of the owner. It can be summoned thus once a day, for a period of up to one hour.

Form 2: Walking Throne

The figurine takes the form shown above, a six-legged throne capped by a long, pointing, tail. The throne can support a single small or medium-size rider carrying up to 350 pounds. It will travel at 40’/round and is extremely agile, ignoring difficult terrain, light undergrowth, and similar minor impediments to movement. It has an Acrobatics bonus of +18, which it can use to jump, pass through threatened areas, etc. It is treated as a Large Animated Object with the following exceptions:

Its Dexterity is 18, giving it AC 19 (Touch 13), and its Reflex save becomes +5

The throne is treated as a mount for most purposes, including mounted combat feats if appropriate. It obeys the rider completely, and no Handle Animal or other such checks are needed. Ride checks, if required, gain a +4 bonus due to the Scorpion Throne’s construction.

The throne form can be summoned for up to 24 hours over the course of a week, divided as the owner sees fit. If killed in throne form, it cannot be resummoned until a week has passed.

[1]Originally, I’d misread a word and had begun working on a PF version of the table on p. 192 of the 1e DMG. Well, that’s 200 pages of content that will never get published, not to mention a trip to Nevada I can no longer claim as a research-related tax writeoff. Ah well.

New And Exotic Armors

Because a fantasy universe should not be limited to “leather, chain, plate”.

This is a selection of (I think) interesting and unusual types of armor, as might be found among different cultures and species. While some use minor magic or alchemy in their construction, they’re not considered magical, but can be enchanted as can any other armor type. (Been working on this, on and off, for a month. Posting it as-is, to post *something*, already. Heavy armors coming soon.)

Shields

Shield

Cost

Armor/Shield Bonus

Maximum Dex Bonus

Armor Check Penalty

Arcane Spell Failure Chance

Speed

Weight

30 ft.

20 ft.

Fungal Cap, Small

7 gp

+1

—

–1

5%

—

—

3 lbs.

Fungal Cap, Large

10 gp

+2

—

–2

5%

—

—

5 lbs.

Gelatinous Flesh

12 gp

+2

—

–2

10%

—

—

6 lbs.

Fungal Cap, Small: These shields are made by many underground races, especially those with little access to metal ores. By taking the caps off underground mushrooms, and coating them with an alchemical lacquer to add rigidity, a reasonable shield can be formed. On a critical hit from a melee attack, however, the shield will shatter, gaining the broken condition. It will also release a puff of choking spores, so that the attacker, if they are adjacent to the defender, must make a DC 12 Fortitude save or be nauseated for 1 round.

Fungal Cap, Large: As fungal cap, small but a large shied, and the DC for the Fortitude save is 14.

Gelatinous Flesh: By carefully slicing and drying a chunk of a gelatinous cube, a rigid sheet can be formed, which can then be placed into a frame. When an enemy misses with a bludgeoning weapon (other than natural weapons) by 5 or more points, the attack rebounds, smacking the attacker in the face for 1-3 points of damage. However, the shield can be over-dried; if the wielder is subjected to fire damage, the shield will crumble to powder and be permanently destroyed.

Light Armor

Armor

Cost

Armor/Shield Bonus

Maximum Dex Bonus

Armor Check Penalty

Arcane Spell Failure Chance

Speed

Weight

30 ft.

20 ft.

Living Bark

5 gp

+2

+4

–2

10%

—

—

5 lbs.

Crystal Silk

250 gp

+1

—

–

0%

—

—

1 lbs.

Living Bark: A secret of cultures that dwell in woodlands, jungles, or swampy groves, living bark armor is made by carefully harvesting bark from trees and treating it constantly with herbs and unguents (the cost of this is not included in the price; this armor is usually kept as communal property by elves, lizardmen, and similar species, given to scouts and warriors as needed, and maintained by the people’s druids, shamans, wise ones, or the like). While somewhat bulky, it has the advantage of adding a +2 equipment bonus to Stealth checks made in the environment the bark was acquired from — this is not affected by the -2 Armor Check Penalty, so the full +2 is gained. This bonus increases to +4 if the wearer is not moving, making it ideal for setting up ambushes. Because the armor is still living, spells which damage or kill plants will affect it, as will warp wood and the like.

If living bark armor is enchanted, it no longer needs to be treated to be kept alive; this is part of the enchantment process and imposes no costs.

Crystal Silk: In areas where links to the elemental plane of earth are common (such as in deep caverns, far underground, isolated from sky and sea by a dozen miles or more), trade can occur. One such item is crystal silk, harvested from the creatures of the elemental plane of earth, and woven by skilled craftspeople into armor vests. It is phenomenally light, flexible, and strong, as well as being hard to cut or pierce, granting DR 1 against non-magical cutting or piercing weapons. Enchanted crystal silk increases this by half the enchantment bonus (minimum 1), but only against weapons with a lower bonus. (So +3 crystal silk has DR 2 against cutting or piercing weapons of +2 or less.)

Medium Armor

Armor

Cost

Armor/Shield Bonus

Maximum Dex Bonus

Armor Check Penalty

Arcane Spell Failure Chance

Speed

Weight

30 ft.

20 ft.

Turtle Shell Breastplate

300 gp

+5

+3

–3*

20%

20 ft.

15 ft.

25 lbs.

Pain Mail

125 gp

+6

+3

–6**

25%

20 ft.

15 ft.

40 lbs.

*Except for Stealth checks.

**See description

Turtle Shell Breastplate: Island dwellers are the most common manufacturers of this armor, formed from the shell of a giant turtle. While bulky and odd-looking, it has a distinct advantage due to its non-metallic, one-piece, nature: The armor check penalty for Stealth checks is only -1.

Pain Mail: A creation of orcs, bugbears, gnolls, and similar races, “pain mail” is basically chainmail made from barbed wire. The design has most of the barbs sticking outwards, but enough touch the flesh of the wearer to inflict constant small wound and scratches. This has several effects. First, anyone grappled by someone wearing pain mail takes 1 point of damage every round, automatically. Second, if a pain mail wearer suffers a critical hit, they begin Bleeding at 1/round (stacks with all other Bleed effects), DC 12 Fortitude save to stop. Third, a pain mail wearer can reduce the armor check penalty to -4 by taking 1d4 damage each time they make a skill check that would be affected by such a penalty. Lastly, a wearer of pain mail gets a +2 on Intimidate checks against beings with a Wisdom of 9 or less (“Wow, he’s so tough!”) but a -2 on Intimidate checks against beings with a Wisdom of 12 or more (“What a freakin’ moron!”).

Lizard

Playing with themes and options to give the site some polish. Nothing permanent as of yet. Generally, I’m unhappy with how white-space-crazy so many themes are, and how focused they are on pictures rather than content.

FWIW, I’ve got four partially-completed articles in my draft folder. Maybe I’ll get to them when I’m done fotzing around like this.

Does anyone know if there’s a free theme or package that will let me insert custom CSS in posts? I want to design a stylesheet to mimic the AD&D 1e format for some things I’m working on, but it’s a damn nightmare so far. I can’t tell if I’m setting the CSS wrong, or editing in the wrong place.

The Grand Hall Of The Aetheric Society, 1899

The Aetheric Society had outgrown its original meeting hall by the late 1880s, but it took five years of construction before the new hall opened (not to the public, of course!) in 1896. At the time, the space reserved for the library was mockingly derided for being larger than could ever be filled, destined “to be as empty of books as the aether itself is empty of matter”, but the laughter rapidly died as collection after collection of works on art, science, engineering, and every other academic subject were purchased… or in some cases, purloined… from around the world.

In the foreground stands the Great Indexer, a customized Lovelace-Tesla Model LX. At the heart is a matrix of tens of thousands of micro-cards, each no larger than a snowflake, which can be fed through the system in response to criteria entered into the machine by the Master Archivist, upon request by a patron of suitable standing. This will locate any and all works in the library which fit the requested pattern, producing a small ribbon imprinted with the necessary codes.

Stretching down the center of the hall are globes of all the worlds where Mankind has trod, with locations of all colonies, friendly and hostile natives, and major aether-ports clearly marked. These globes are not fixed and static displays, but are designed so that changing borders, new discoveries, and so on can be placed rapidly, so that they are never more than a week out of date.